This monument below shows the eqautor in Ecuador. My Travel Teddy moved from the northern to the southern hemisphere in two steps!
These street entertainers from Argentina met My Travel Teddy in Quito, Ecuador.
This very attractive marine iguana from the Galapagos came a little closer to see My Travel Teddy.
To make contributions, simply go to the Meta section in the margin to the left of this paragraph and use the Register link to create your account. A password will be e-mailed to you. You will have the status of Contributor. Then use Meta to Login. Select Site Admin then use the Posts section and click Add New (here highlighted in red).
To add images to your posts, click on the rectangle with the frame around it that appears immediately to the right of 
Upload/Insert (here highlighted in red). When the next window appears, click on Select Files. You can then select an image from your computer and the blog software will add it after you’ve selected Insert Into Post. Be sure to click on the Publish button to the right, or, if you’re editing an existing post, the Update Post button.
In the interest of Internet safety, postings from Contributors won’t appear immediately. I will review them first. After I’ve reviewed the posts I will complete the publishing process.
I’m looking forward to lots of great images and stories!
Dale Hubert
As I spend more time on My Travel Teddy and have more contact with others, I’m learning about some very interesting people and some very intriguing initiatives.
Here’s one that impresses me a lot!
It may not be the way everyone would like to spend their holidays, but this Christmas vacation I’ve devoted day after day to building My Travel Teddy. In addition to the necessary stuff like setting up the hosting, arranging for an automated form to be created, adding the Bulletin Board and Blog and stuff like that, I find the figure of the teddy bear is so captivating that I’ve spent hours working on the image on the main page. I began with images I took of the pyramid of Ghiza in 2004 and a picture of Central Park in 2007. I was able to craft a transition with New York on the left and Egypt on the right to signify the vast community that I hope My Travel Teddy to reach. I added a bear to the middle and was done – or so I thought. Next, I added a shadow to make it appear the bear was actually sitting there. Then I figured perhaps a reflection in the water would be a nice touch, so I inverted the image and used the clone tool to make a reflection. That was two days ago. Since then, I’ve redone the image 6 times, reworking the reflection each time, then finally used a motion blur filter on the reflection to make it look like water.
I mention all this in the hope that others will find My Travel Teddy to be a likely subject for even more creative work.
There’s something very appealing about working with My Travel Teddy images.
This bear wasn’t really on a path in the woods; in fact, it was on a pillow in my living room. I used Gimp to add shadows. For example, the shadow by the ear was added using a Levels function. Then I inserted the bear into an image I’d taken of the flood plain behind my house. This particular bear is only about 6 inches tall but appears much larger in this picture.
Things are progressing very nicely on the new site, thanks to programmer and wizard, Jim McNair. Jim is adding features so those on the List of Participants can send each other e-mail. He’s also password-protecting portions of the site so only My Travel Teddy registered users can access them. Much of this is behind-the-scenes stuff, so the results of his efforts aren’t all that evident.
I’m not working as hard as Jim is, but I haven’t been idle, either. I’m working on a story to support the premise of the site. I’m also reaching out to a few established authors for their contributions.
I’m hoping for a March 2009 launch.
I’ve found that a prerequisite for success is the mindset that the student brings to the classroom. Some very young students often seem defeated and in many ways seem to have given up. With report cards giving them low grades, with them having enough insight to know other kids are picking up stuff more quickly, school can seem overwhelming. There are many reasons for initial lack of success – too little stimulation and support at home, perhaps being born in December (so the January kids have almost an entire year head-start on them), or perhaps they’re simply late bloomers. I refer to it as the Baby Elephant Syndrome.
I tell my students how circus elephants are tethered in place with a chain around their foot attached to a stake in the ground. How is it that this giant animal, capable of ripping entire trees from the ground, can be held in place by a chain on a stake?
The answer is that when they were small and weak, the baby elephants were chained to stakes in the ground. Because they were babies, they couldn’t pull out the stakes, so they gave up. Even after they became full-grown elephants they no longer tried, having learned as a baby that they couldn’t succeed
For students who haven’t already made the connection, elephants have much more ability than they think they do, as do many of our less successful students. Perhaps these students weren’t good readers or weren’t successful; at math, but that was long ago. The message is, Don’t fall for the Baby Elephant syndrome! Give it another try! And then another.
I’ve recently been putting a lot of pressure on myself to get this new My Travel Teddy site moving along. It isn’t what I want it to be – yet. Adding that little word – yet – somehow takes off some of the stress. Which reminds me of a strategy I use with my students.
While it’s important to be sensitive of the students’ feelings, there comes a time when it’s necessary to tell a student that an answer is wrong. I’ve had student teachers who were so overly sensitive to the feelings of children that the student teachers never quite came out and said an answer was wrong. They’d day, “Good try,” or “Excellent effort,” but they wouldn’t actually declare that the student was wrong. The problem with this is that other students have overheard the first students’ answer, and now they don’t know if the answer is right or wrong. It can get very murky!
So, how can we as teachers tell students they are wrong, that they just don’t get it, that they can’t do something without hurting feelings or discouraging effort?
The secret is: YET
This year I am fortunate to be team-teaching with Zillah Moss and in our class we spend parts of the first few days of the new school year making giant posters of the word YET. We have students work co-operativley designing and colouring the letters. It’s a great way for kids to get to know each other as the new school year begins. Students also put the word YET on the first page of their new workbooks.
It’s such a simple word, yet it’s so very powerful. So we as teachers can say, “No, you don’t get it – yet.” Or a student can say, “I can’t do math – yet.” There’s a huge difference between “I can’t read” and “I can’t read, yet.”
Introducing YET as a significant part of the classroom vocabulary can open a world of possibilities. It works for us as parents, t
It’s May 16. Much has happened since the last March posts. My Travel Teddy has indeed been launched. There are already 7 people o the Lists of Participants. That’s as least as popular as the Flat Stanley Project was back in 1994!
I have some inside information that I can’t share; however, I hope to soon report on some interesting FS marriage relationships. I also hope to hear from 4Kids and TVO.
This is the first image I created for My Travel Teddy. It was a project that took three days in February, 2009. The actual bear is quite small but by adding the shadow and the reflection and placing it against the larger images in the background it has the appearance of being a much bigger bear. It’s a composite image and the part on the left is New York City that I took when I was in town for Jeff Brown’s memorial service. The section on the right is from a visit to Egypt in 2004. I was hoping this would serve as a metaphor to show how connected the world is. The reflection was a challenge and I used several blur filters on it after inverting the bear image. I used Gimp as my graphic editor and I’m pleased with the results.